John Dowbiggin, founder & CEO of Acuity Unified Communications, speaks about present and future of the Asterisk based call-center industry

John is the founder & CEO of Acuity Unified Communications and has over 30 years experience in the telecoms industry.
Prior to setting up Acuity he was MD at AboveNet, turning the company from near bankruptcy into one of today’s leading managed IP/fibre optical service providers in the City of London.
Before that John was the VP for I.P. Solutions at Cable & Wireless UK & Ireland, accountable to the group’s President for all aspects of I.P. sales strategy. He joined C&W through their acquisition of Internet Network Services, one of the UK’s largest Tier 1 ISPs, where he was National Sales Director.
Responsible for the building & running of the UK & European sales operation, he spent two years developing & deploying one of the largest Internet market acquisition strategies in Europe.
Prior to that he was Director, South East Region for Telewest Communications PLC (now Virgin Media), which at the time, was the UK’s largest telecommunications, cable TV & ISP.

For more information please refer to Acuity Unified Communications' Corporate Website at: https://acuityuc.com/


John Dowbiggin, founder & CEO of Acuity Unified Communications.


Q: Could you please summarize for our readers your company profile, your target customer and reference market?

Acuity Unified Communications, based in the UK, is a next-generation, IP-based communications provider supplying a range of products including Unified Communications solutions with full mobile integration, high-speed dedicated leased internet access circuits, MPLS and IPVPN solutions & Hosting Services including Virtual Private Servers within the Acuity cloud.
It provides solutions for VoIP-based inbound and outbound call centres built around QueueMetrics, QueueMetrics-Live and WombatDialer software.
We operate these services on our privately-owned platforms and are not dependent on 3rd parties.
We work with a wide range of customers with call centres from 10 seats up to large operations with over 350 seats.
Our customers include public utilities, emergency services, retail chains, leasing and insurance firms to name but a few.

Q: What kind of benefits do you experience using and selling QueueMetrics and WombatDialer?

Integrating the Queuemetrics product into the Acuity feature rich platform, enables us to offer fully-featured call center solutions. This includes wallboards and reporting of over 180 metrics.
This has provided us with the ability to fulfill any requirement our call centre customers have, including reporting data that ultimately gets submitted to regulatory bodies such as OFWAT.
WombatDialer has further extended our call center offering.
This software enables us to not only offer a dialer solution, but a dialer solution that has been written with Queuemetrics compatibility in mind.
Being able to offer a feature rich platform that has been call center enabled by Queuemetrics and dialer enabled by Wombat Dialer puts us in a position where we are offering the most flexible, easy to use and fully featured solution every time.

Q: Could you give me an example of how you have dealt with a customers critical issue using QueueMetrics or WombatDialer?

Having a 300+ agent call center for a large Public Utility, we had to take advantage of Loway’s Unlimited Agent Licence.
This customer has to regularly search for all call recordings associated with an end user when dealing with complaints.
Queuemetrics enables the customer complaints team to search through hundreds of thousands of call records and retrieve call recordings in a matter of seconds.
Plus, there is supervisor access.
Queuemetrics gives our customer the ability to do this themselves which enables them to meet their strict deadlines for dealing with complaints from members of the public.

Q: What are the key factors which make a successful Asterisk based call-centre?

With Asterisk being Opensource, it provides us with ultimate flexibility when designing our call centers.
There is no code that is locked down and we are able to customise the solution exactly to the customer's requirement through our own, in-house development team.

Q: Mr. Dowbiggin, what’s your view on the Asterisk call-center industry future in the next two years?

Even with more competition, the Asterisk based call center industry still remains strong.
Asterisk based call centers will most certainly be the go-to for the foreseeable future mainly based on the true flexibility allowing unique customisation for clients.
With Loway’s commitment to continue development on its Asterisk based products, we believe we have the ultimate call center product on the market.